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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

You Really Should Have a Genealogy Website

If you are doing genealogy research and don't have a website, you do not know what you might be missing. Even after almost two years of blogging, I still get far more inquiries because of my website simply because there are so many more people listed there than I have written about here.

Today, I received an e-mail from a Neely family researcher. She found my website searching for her great-grandfather, Jefferson Davis Neely, and wrote to let me know that I had an extra "e" in his last name (I had it as Neeley). I have not done any research on Jefferson. I'm not actually related to the Neely family and only had him in my database because his daughter, Alma, married my grandfather's brother, James Dolphin Lanier.

After responding and thanking her for the correction, I heard back from her a little later. By that time, she had found my photo of Roy Neely's headstone. This time she told me that Roy was Alma's brother. She wondered about Roy's relationship to the Lanier family. Well, Kathleen's mother, Hettie Lanier, was James' sister so that means Kathleen married her uncle's brother-in-law. I had no idea that Roy and Alma were siblings and had never even realized that they had the same last name (maybe because I had the extra "e" in Alma's name but probably because I had not paid close enough attention to these people who married into the family).This Neely researcher also told me that Kathleen was in a Maytag ad in the 1960s. When I started typing a Google search for the ad, I really didn't expect to find it. But I did. She appeared in at least two issues of Life Magazine, probably many more considering the two I found are six months apart. This one from 17 Nov 1961 and another issue from 16 May 1962 are available in Google Books. There are even a couple of the actual magazine pages for sale on ebay for a few bucks. (Yes, I ordered one. How often do you find a relative in Life Magazine, even if it was an ad?)

Claudia - The Home page and the other pages that look like it were created with Yahoo!Sitebuilder software that comes with a Yahoo site. (There are sites selling web space cheaper than Yahoo! but it would be too much work for me right now to switch - plus I'd lose those pages.) I've had this one for almost 5 years.

All of the Family Tree pages were created by Legacy Family Tree Software. This page - http://familyfile.lfmccauley.com/grpmain - is meant to be the site's home page in the Legacy setup but since I had the other option, I didn't do much with that page.

Thanks Susan. I'm really tired of the the layout (it's been 5 years) and the theme (almost 3 years) but don't have the time right now to devote to changing it so instead I made the blog match it. That will probably push me to make some changes sooner than later.

Well, thanks to this prompt from you Linda, I've at least made a start over at Weebly. I'm just playing around with it for the time being but your fantabulous website will get a lot of traffic from me for ideas and pointers. I love your use of the Genelines timelines and I see it will work right along with my older version of FTM.

You may be tired of the layout of your website but I think it's great, honestly one of the best I've seen. You've done a beautiful job!

So very true! However, I have to say my best connections have come from Find-A-Grave and from Ancestry.com (baiting them with documents or photos that are downloaded). I've had a few connections through my web site...wish there were more...